The Capital City
There aren’t too many places where after you have to walk some 20 kms a day and on top of that lose your way and end up circling for an hour, that you would call a beautiful city. However Washington DC is one such place. Its’ truly beautiful and the walk all around is worth every bit including the part where I got lost.
To tell you about my visit to Washington I must first praise the great subway system that was my life line during the duration of my stay and the very helpful people. With the people and maps for my guide and the subway as my tool I managed to travel extensively around the city. This was also a city with lots of friends who ensured that I had a time of my life and was taken care of and pampered like a child when I got back from the tours of the day.
My favourite place in Washington has to be what is called The Mall. It also is the area around which most of the areas of interest are located. The areas that I visited in Washington can broadly be classified into three: The first is the set of museums of the Smithsonian Institute, the second is the monuments and memorials of the past and the third is the continuing set of official buildings.
James Smithsonian, the founder of Smithsonian Institute which houses all the museums had visualized it as what he then called “a quest for the increase of knowledge among men”. This place has lived up to its reputation. The range of museums range from Air and Space, to natural history, to fine arts, to American history and even Holocaust history. I realized that it would be foolish to try and see all of the 8 odd museums. I spent most of time at the Air and Space museum (the world’s most visited museum) given my long standing interest in aircrafts. In fact I went to both their museums including the one an hour away in Virginia. I saw a Concorde, the fastest aircraft ever flown (Blackbird), Enola Gay (aircraft that dropped the Hiroshima bomb), Colombia moon landing module and also USS Enterprise. While this was the newer breed the older breed included Wright Brothers aircraft, Lindbergh’s aircraft and a whole lot more. In fact the museum also has a simulated flying experience where I am quite sure I crashed the aircraft quite a few times!
The other museums I spent time in were the Museum of Natural History (with an amazing dinosaur collection and the famous Hope Diamond), Museum of American History (which has a motley collection from Judy Garland’s slippers as Dorothy, Lance Armstrong’s bicycle, Ray Charles’s keys, IBM Deep Blue Machine, Edison’s lamps and even First Ladies costume) and finally the deeply moving Museum of Holocaust. In the Holocaust museum they give you a card at random where you can read at random about the life story of one holocaust victim and trace his life while you move through the museum. I took a short walk in the end through the Hoshbourne sculpture garden but its slightly difficult to appreciate it without proper guidance.. Each of these museums I can spend a page writing about at a précis minimum level which I ll refrain from here.
The second set of places I visited in Washington include government official buildings. My favourite among them is the Capitol. It is a truly majestic building sitting at the head of the table of the Smithsonian institution buildings. It is flanked by the different ministries, and behind it lie the Library of the Congress and the Supreme Court, both equally majestic buildings. However they are all these buildings very similar in architecture, made out of white marble. If you drive down Jefferson Drive from the Capitol you get to a very significant building today, The Voice of America, the propaganda radio of USA internationally. However if you drive the other way down Pennsylvania Avenue you come to J Edgar Hoover Building, the headquarters of FBI. The other building that I did see and take photographs of (even though its actually not allowed) is The Pentagon, planning centre of most wars in the world for good or for bad. The striking thing about the Pentagon is that nowhere does the building say its pentagon. It just has one single colour face to the world manned as heavily fortified fortress which reeks of a simple message: Stay Away, You are not welcome here.
This brings me to a beautiful walk you can take from the Capitol down to the Washington Monument and then on your way to the Lincoln Memorial, if you pause and turn right you will see it, The White House, abode to the most powerful man in the world, home of the President of the United States. It was such a disappointment. The first view I got was from the back but I walked all around it to the front and beyond but trust me the building is nothing as grand as the Rashtrapati Bhavan you see in New Delhi. I saw all the parts of the building you can from outside including, the place where the president helicopter lands to the place where the press is briefed. It frankly looks a lot like Calcutta Club. In fact I was reminded of a Michael Douglas and Annete Bening movie, I forget the name where before they make love for the first time, a rather sheepy Michael Douglas confesses to Bening, if you think that because I am the most powerful man on earth, I really may not be one. None of the places mentioned here did I actually enter even though I believe that tours of the Capitol is possible if you go early and give a line but for the White House, you need a Congressman’s letter of recommendation and you need to apply six months in advance! I did also manage to take a photograph outside the Paul E Goddard Centre of NASA, only because Swade was shot there!
The historical places in Washington are all political in nature as you would expect in a capital city in a nation only three hundred years old. I began my tour with The Washington Monument, the tallest structure in Washington. In fact this is the reason why there are no sky scrapers in Washington as by a decree there cannot be any construction taller than this one. My favourite obviously had to be Lincoln Memorial. This is one person both me and my mother have always admired. As for me his speeches are probably the best I have ever read. I wonder what it would have been to hear him though. So I spent a lot of time reading those two presidential addresses written next to his huge statue that I was so familiar with from childhood. In fact I then went down to the basement and read up even more of his speeches. I got the snap clicked which had been in the planning for a long time; I stood at the place where Martin Luther King Jr had delivered his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech on the steps of Lincoln Memorial as if it was me delivering some speech from there.
I continued my walk after Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial and saw the three war memorials; World War II memorial, Korean War Memorial and Vietnam War Memorial. I was deeply moved by a couple of sights at the Vietnam War memorial. There s a book kept there with the list of names of all those killed or missing in action and their names are also sculpted on the walls. There were two couple who stood there obviously searching for their son’s names, photographing the pages and the walls all the while silent tears rolling down their faces. I saw letters written by the friends of those killed in action kept next to their names and also roses with letters from schools in USA. If there is one thing the world can learn from USA, its how to honour your war heroes. The Korean War Memorial is slightly smaller in side and less personal in nature but has this amazing inscription which reads “Our Nation honours her sons and daughters who answered the call to defend a country they never knew and a people they never met”. You can abuse this nation as much as you want and claim that all it does is out of self interest but I for one trust their inherent belief in freedom and liberty as principles of desire and appreciate what they think is their responsibility to ensure freedom and liberty across the world. The instruments and instances might have gone wrong a few times but as a philosophy I support it wholeheartedly. The last and the latest of the war memorials is the World War II Memorial and here its evident that USA wants to tell everyone why they go about the world exporting forcefully what they call liberty and democracy. The first inscription here reads “Americans came to liberate, not to conquer, to restore freedom and to end tyranny”. I feel the confidence missing and a mechanism of self defence move into its place.
This entire walk from World War II Memorial to Lincoln Memorial is on the banks of a lake both sides of which has cherry trees which when in bloom, you have the Cherry Blossom Festival here. However the interesting point being that these were all gifts of friendship from the Japanese. Having seen Enola Gay, I couldn’t see how the Japanese were gifting cherry trees of friendship to the Americans! The last place I visited was the Jefferson Memorial, which is located very beautifully on the banks of the Potomac River. I successfully managed to lose my way trying to act smart and take my own short cuts through the city and ended up walking a good one hour at least in circles. The point however is that even though at the end of it my legs were aching a bit, and I was running horribly late, the walk itself was so beautiful that I didn’t regret it even for a minute. A couple of other places that I did visit the next day again from outside were the Watergate Building of Nixon fame and the Kennedy Performing Arts Centre.
The final place in this itenary is obviously Arlington Cemetry. While everyone seems to go there for the tombs of the Kennedy family I found the shrine to the Unknown Soldier with its own change of guard ceremony to be a much better thing to see. In fact the memorials to the Challenger and Columbia tragedies and the house of General Lee (including the view from there) were also attractions far more worth a visit than the grave of the Kennedy’s, no offence meant to yet another great American president. If the tragedy of the Vietnam War wasn’t obvious at the memorial, the never ending sea of graves for this war made almost everyone; child and old alike in the trolley sit up and take notice. This is what I guess makes the Americans ask, are we ready to pay this price and get the reply, no price is too great to protect the rights of free men.
To tell you about my visit to Washington I must first praise the great subway system that was my life line during the duration of my stay and the very helpful people. With the people and maps for my guide and the subway as my tool I managed to travel extensively around the city. This was also a city with lots of friends who ensured that I had a time of my life and was taken care of and pampered like a child when I got back from the tours of the day.
My favourite place in Washington has to be what is called The Mall. It also is the area around which most of the areas of interest are located. The areas that I visited in Washington can broadly be classified into three: The first is the set of museums of the Smithsonian Institute, the second is the monuments and memorials of the past and the third is the continuing set of official buildings.
James Smithsonian, the founder of Smithsonian Institute which houses all the museums had visualized it as what he then called “a quest for the increase of knowledge among men”. This place has lived up to its reputation. The range of museums range from Air and Space, to natural history, to fine arts, to American history and even Holocaust history. I realized that it would be foolish to try and see all of the 8 odd museums. I spent most of time at the Air and Space museum (the world’s most visited museum) given my long standing interest in aircrafts. In fact I went to both their museums including the one an hour away in Virginia. I saw a Concorde, the fastest aircraft ever flown (Blackbird), Enola Gay (aircraft that dropped the Hiroshima bomb), Colombia moon landing module and also USS Enterprise. While this was the newer breed the older breed included Wright Brothers aircraft, Lindbergh’s aircraft and a whole lot more. In fact the museum also has a simulated flying experience where I am quite sure I crashed the aircraft quite a few times!
The other museums I spent time in were the Museum of Natural History (with an amazing dinosaur collection and the famous Hope Diamond), Museum of American History (which has a motley collection from Judy Garland’s slippers as Dorothy, Lance Armstrong’s bicycle, Ray Charles’s keys, IBM Deep Blue Machine, Edison’s lamps and even First Ladies costume) and finally the deeply moving Museum of Holocaust. In the Holocaust museum they give you a card at random where you can read at random about the life story of one holocaust victim and trace his life while you move through the museum. I took a short walk in the end through the Hoshbourne sculpture garden but its slightly difficult to appreciate it without proper guidance.. Each of these museums I can spend a page writing about at a précis minimum level which I ll refrain from here.
The second set of places I visited in Washington include government official buildings. My favourite among them is the Capitol. It is a truly majestic building sitting at the head of the table of the Smithsonian institution buildings. It is flanked by the different ministries, and behind it lie the Library of the Congress and the Supreme Court, both equally majestic buildings. However they are all these buildings very similar in architecture, made out of white marble. If you drive down Jefferson Drive from the Capitol you get to a very significant building today, The Voice of America, the propaganda radio of USA internationally. However if you drive the other way down Pennsylvania Avenue you come to J Edgar Hoover Building, the headquarters of FBI. The other building that I did see and take photographs of (even though its actually not allowed) is The Pentagon, planning centre of most wars in the world for good or for bad. The striking thing about the Pentagon is that nowhere does the building say its pentagon. It just has one single colour face to the world manned as heavily fortified fortress which reeks of a simple message: Stay Away, You are not welcome here.
This brings me to a beautiful walk you can take from the Capitol down to the Washington Monument and then on your way to the Lincoln Memorial, if you pause and turn right you will see it, The White House, abode to the most powerful man in the world, home of the President of the United States. It was such a disappointment. The first view I got was from the back but I walked all around it to the front and beyond but trust me the building is nothing as grand as the Rashtrapati Bhavan you see in New Delhi. I saw all the parts of the building you can from outside including, the place where the president helicopter lands to the place where the press is briefed. It frankly looks a lot like Calcutta Club. In fact I was reminded of a Michael Douglas and Annete Bening movie, I forget the name where before they make love for the first time, a rather sheepy Michael Douglas confesses to Bening, if you think that because I am the most powerful man on earth, I really may not be one. None of the places mentioned here did I actually enter even though I believe that tours of the Capitol is possible if you go early and give a line but for the White House, you need a Congressman’s letter of recommendation and you need to apply six months in advance! I did also manage to take a photograph outside the Paul E Goddard Centre of NASA, only because Swade was shot there!
The historical places in Washington are all political in nature as you would expect in a capital city in a nation only three hundred years old. I began my tour with The Washington Monument, the tallest structure in Washington. In fact this is the reason why there are no sky scrapers in Washington as by a decree there cannot be any construction taller than this one. My favourite obviously had to be Lincoln Memorial. This is one person both me and my mother have always admired. As for me his speeches are probably the best I have ever read. I wonder what it would have been to hear him though. So I spent a lot of time reading those two presidential addresses written next to his huge statue that I was so familiar with from childhood. In fact I then went down to the basement and read up even more of his speeches. I got the snap clicked which had been in the planning for a long time; I stood at the place where Martin Luther King Jr had delivered his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech on the steps of Lincoln Memorial as if it was me delivering some speech from there.
I continued my walk after Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial and saw the three war memorials; World War II memorial, Korean War Memorial and Vietnam War Memorial. I was deeply moved by a couple of sights at the Vietnam War memorial. There s a book kept there with the list of names of all those killed or missing in action and their names are also sculpted on the walls. There were two couple who stood there obviously searching for their son’s names, photographing the pages and the walls all the while silent tears rolling down their faces. I saw letters written by the friends of those killed in action kept next to their names and also roses with letters from schools in USA. If there is one thing the world can learn from USA, its how to honour your war heroes. The Korean War Memorial is slightly smaller in side and less personal in nature but has this amazing inscription which reads “Our Nation honours her sons and daughters who answered the call to defend a country they never knew and a people they never met”. You can abuse this nation as much as you want and claim that all it does is out of self interest but I for one trust their inherent belief in freedom and liberty as principles of desire and appreciate what they think is their responsibility to ensure freedom and liberty across the world. The instruments and instances might have gone wrong a few times but as a philosophy I support it wholeheartedly. The last and the latest of the war memorials is the World War II Memorial and here its evident that USA wants to tell everyone why they go about the world exporting forcefully what they call liberty and democracy. The first inscription here reads “Americans came to liberate, not to conquer, to restore freedom and to end tyranny”. I feel the confidence missing and a mechanism of self defence move into its place.
This entire walk from World War II Memorial to Lincoln Memorial is on the banks of a lake both sides of which has cherry trees which when in bloom, you have the Cherry Blossom Festival here. However the interesting point being that these were all gifts of friendship from the Japanese. Having seen Enola Gay, I couldn’t see how the Japanese were gifting cherry trees of friendship to the Americans! The last place I visited was the Jefferson Memorial, which is located very beautifully on the banks of the Potomac River. I successfully managed to lose my way trying to act smart and take my own short cuts through the city and ended up walking a good one hour at least in circles. The point however is that even though at the end of it my legs were aching a bit, and I was running horribly late, the walk itself was so beautiful that I didn’t regret it even for a minute. A couple of other places that I did visit the next day again from outside were the Watergate Building of Nixon fame and the Kennedy Performing Arts Centre.
The final place in this itenary is obviously Arlington Cemetry. While everyone seems to go there for the tombs of the Kennedy family I found the shrine to the Unknown Soldier with its own change of guard ceremony to be a much better thing to see. In fact the memorials to the Challenger and Columbia tragedies and the house of General Lee (including the view from there) were also attractions far more worth a visit than the grave of the Kennedy’s, no offence meant to yet another great American president. If the tragedy of the Vietnam War wasn’t obvious at the memorial, the never ending sea of graves for this war made almost everyone; child and old alike in the trolley sit up and take notice. This is what I guess makes the Americans ask, are we ready to pay this price and get the reply, no price is too great to protect the rights of free men.
posted by Abilin Mukherjee at 6:48 PM
1 Comments:
good to see that you havent lost your eloquence abilin!
subham here. seems like u are really making the most of your stay in the US. Keep in touch if u can!
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